(December 4, 2015) -- The City of Alamo Heights released its comprehensive plan in 2009, detailing its hopes of becoming a more pedestrian, business-friendly and urban city. But this plan hasn’t been without controversy. Recent developments along the 2.5-mile stretch of Broadway in Alamo Heights and long overdue changes to building codes are generating much discussion about what becoming an “urban” city might actually mean. In addition, nearly fifty percent of Broadway’s urban landscape is flanked by parking space, while nearly all spaces along the corridor in Alamo Heights are tied to businesses, leaving almost no public space for people to gather as citizens and not consumers.

On Dec. 9 at the Alamo Heights Fire Station, Dr. Antonio Petrov, DDes, assistant professor of architecture at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) College of Architecture, Construction and Planning, and a team of students will unveil a new urban scale installation titled “The Third Condition” that explores architectural interventions that could serve to invigorate new life and inspire the growth of new public and consumer spaces in Alamo Heights.

Petrov’s “Think/Do-Tank” will present their many research-based strategies and individual architectural propositions – in the forms of scale models, designs and other materials – that they have worked on over the Fall 2015 semester to local citizens, scholars and officials.

The event will be repeated on Dec. 10 when the installation moves to Brick at Blue Star Arts Complex for the second night of the exhibit. Both events are part exhibit, part conversation and free and open to the public. Interested parties are encouraged to attend both nights. The event structure and student presentations will be the same, but participants can expect to engage in unique dialogue during each night of the exhibit.

About “The Third Condition”
The “Third Condition” is a proposed linear park situated parallel to Broadway that aims to find equilibrium between open and closed spaces, the natural and artificial, and the urban and non-urban. It includes a continuous public garden, walkways, plazas and a bike path connecting Basse Rd. to Hildebrand.

Students in Petrov’s “Think/Do-Tank” will share their strategies and architectural intervention projects during the events in an attempt to engage the vibrant and diverse Alamo Heights community. For this exhibit, each student was asked to step away from the traditional confined domains of the urban master-planner. Instead, their projects were designed as new “rooms in the city” that could operate as catalysts and active agents from the street, for the street, and about the street to give Broadway a new sense of place.

For more information, contact Nicole Chavez, Communications & Development Coordinator for the UTSA College of Architecture, Construction and Planning at nicole.chavez@utsa.edu or 210.458.3121.